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Major General William Rapp · Five Questions for a General

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign.
• 0:03
  Speaker B: You're listening to Five Questions for a General, a production of the Modern Morse at West point. I am Dr. Charles Fate, the team lead for this podcast series which features interviews of senior military leaders conducted by specially selected and trained West Point cadet hosts. These exchanges produce timely, relevant, and inspirational insights for professional development of leaders at all levels.
• 0:24
  Speaker C: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the class of 1974 recruiting studio and the five questions for general podcast. I'm Cadet Donovan Scott, your host. It is my pleasure to be here today with retired Major General Bill Rapp. General Rapp spent over 30 years in the United States army, which included multiple combat deployments, as well as tours of duty as Commandant of the U.S. military Academy at West Point and Command of the U.S. army War College. Our discussion today centers on leadership and decision making. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. General, welcome to the show.
• 0:53
  Speaker A: Thank you, Donovan. Really appreciate you having me.
• 0:56
  Speaker C: General Rapp, you are a West Point graduate and also later served as commandant cadets here. As part of your origin story, can you please explain what made you want to come to West Point as cadet and why you decided to later come back as a commandant?
• 1:07
  Speaker A: I've actually lived 11 years of my life at West Point. I went third through fifth grade as a student at the West Point Elementary School. My father was attacked for company E4 after being a cadet class of 1984. I came back and taught in the social department from 94 to 96, and then came back and was had the privilege of being commandant, which is, you know, by far the best job the army can never give anybody. So what brought me to West Point? My father was an rotc, longtime army officer. I wanted to be in the Army. I had all planned on going ROTC to Colorado School of Mines, and then the. The West Point offer of admission came in and I thought, okay, I know I'm already going to be an army officer. Why am I not going to West Point? And just might have disappointed my father in saying I'm going to West Point, not to your alma mater, but he came around, so it worked out well.
• 1:54
  Speaker C: I think you made the right choice, sir.
• 1:55
  Speaker A: I think so.
• 1:56
  Speaker C: Well, let's start with the questions. General Rapp, you have held an astonishing number of very different leadership roles in your career, from first as a cadet, being first captain at West Point, to being commandant here, to leading troops overseas in multiple combat deployments, and even serving as congressional liaison. These roles often involved not just tactical level military challenges, but also the alignment of many diverse stakeholders. Can you describe a time when you had to build alignment among very different groups, that is military, political or non uniformed and what strategies you used to do that successfully, sir.
• 2:24
  Speaker A: So I, when I got promoted to brigadier general, I had only been in army units or joint units and very hierarchical, very much the commander can say what to do now. The wise commander's always taken awful lot of guidance. The very first job I had when I got promoted to brigadier General was the commander of Northwestern division of the U.S. army Corps of Engineers in charge of the waterworks, the Missouri river, the Snake river, the Columbia river from St. Louis north and west to the Puget Sound. 5,200 employees, Army Corps of Engineers. Only 18 of them wore uniform. And they looked at me having not spent a single day in the U.S. army Corps of Engineers, even though I'm an engineer regiment officer, as is this person qualified, number one. And then I found out that I was then the name federal defendant in the lawsuit on salmon in the Pacific Northwest. The Corps of Engineers is being sued by environmental groups about salmon. It's really about the dams on the Columbian Snake Rivers. And as the commander on the named defendant in that. And I still had to progress forward in what are we going to do with the dams, how are we going to meet our obligations to salmon runs, to sea lion predation, all of these other kinds of things. And, and what I found was all of those diverse stakeholders, we had to at least come to some alignment on a definition of what are the big objectives. And if I could get everyone to kind of agree that these are the big objectives and if one of them said get rid of the dams, well, that's not an objective that I can do. That's, you know, Congress made them. They're going to have to be the ones that tell them to tear down. But could we agree that salmon returns have to get stronger every year, that the distinct different species have to have to be viable. You get to those kind of big agreements and then you create the collaborative forums that allow people to kind of argue because at the end of the day you're not going to make everybody completely happy. But if they were open and transparent in the forums, then the decisions that I had to make as the commander of Northwestern Division of the Corps of Engineers, what to do with all the dams, how much water to release out, all of those kind of things. I felt that they trusted that I was at least a straight shooter. They might not like all of the decisions, but then I committed to when we make this decision, here's how we're going to assess how this decision is working. And I'm committed to adaptation of that decision along the way. And when you get that kind of agreement on the big picture, you get kind of alignment, then you're really fighting about the strategies that go forward and then you're thinking about okay, this strategy. And, and I would never wanted to choose a strategy that didn't have off ramps, that didn't have the ability to do what we would call branch plans in the event that the, whatever we were measuring was not panning out. And that's how my very first job as a Brigadier General, I up until then I never really had to negotiate with a whole lot of other groups in order to make a decision. And I realized that that is the life of a general officer. You're almost always working with constituencies that do not have to obey what you say. So it really does come down into how can you gain alignment at least on the big ideas. And you could argue about strategies along the way and you do the very best you can in pursuit of those common big goals. That's what I found most important.
• 5:44
  Speaker C: I really like your answer on that, sir. I feel that is both applicable both in the big sense and the small sense. I think you agree you mentioned that you never had to do that until you're Brigadier General. But I do see that especially here at West Point with cadet leadership, peer leadership, alignment on the grand scheme and then you can branch out into how you're actually going to attack that objective.
• 6:02
  Speaker A: Yeah, and I had good training of that. You know, as, as first captain class of 84, you're leading your peers and it's not like you can knife hand direct them to do a bunch of things because there's always ways that people can slow roll or, or pursue their own goals. But it's how do you work collaboratively? When I get out into the army, you probably don't have to do that as much. But the smart always, you're always getting your insights from your non commissioned officers, always getting insights from fellow commanders and peers and such. And it is a dummy who doesn't listen with the intent to be influenced by the people that are around them.
• 6:39
  Speaker C: Yes, you're right, sir. Having led large and small organizations as you have both mentioned here, in both the army and the civilian world, what are the biggest obstacles to challenging leadership culture for the better? How have you managed those challenges in your own leadership role, sir?
• 6:52
  Speaker A: Yeah. So culture in any organization is incredibly important. And I know that cadets will always study the shine model and most of culture is way down part of that iceberg, way below the water. Surface. What do you really believe in your heart on these things? And if you come in as a leader of an organization and you are attempting to do something 90 degrees east or west of whatever the organization believes is their true culture, there's always going to be inertia and pushback and very subtle ways of confounding you. And when I, I love the definition that culture is this combination of what you say is important, what you do, your actions toward what you say, how you prioritize scarce resources, what are you actually measuring and then how do you reward people for their behavior if those are not in alignment? You, if you're saying I want collaboration, and yet what you're doing is making all your decisions in smoky D rooms. If you say you want collaboration, but your incentive structure is set up to recognize individual behavior rather than collective behavior, if what you're measuring is only related to a small subset of what you say is important, all of those things combine to get people confused about what is the culture that we're trying to change. I'll give you an example. Commandant of the US Army War College, essentially the president of the Army War College, where colonels are learning this the very last school that they will go to. Hopefully for most of them, they want to become generals. And I had, I inherited what seemed to be a big fight between my faculty, my civilian PhD faculty versus my military practitioner faculty on what is the raison d' etre of the War College. Are we a, an idea producing school? You know, we're out there just sending ideas out. That's what the civilian PhD faculty kind of love, the military practitioners. No, we're getting these colonels ready for their next job. We're going to make them good in their next job out in the Army. And I looked and I said, why do we have such a schism here? And then I realized how we rate our faculty so that they could get promoted, so that they could get pay raises or anything else was different between the civilian faculty and the military faculty. We rated the civilian faculty on whether they published, whether they put their ideas out there. So of course they're going to be focused on idea production. We rated the military faculty on how much they were giving back and serving in their summer months. Would they go out and work with the big army so that they were much more in tuned with what does the army need from its graduates? And we had the incentive structure set up so that they were working at cross purposes. So, okay, knock on us for doing that. So we changed the vision of the Army War College to the purpose of the Army War College is to produce leaders and ideas invaluable to the army and the nation. The idea is we're not our own critic. I mean, this isn't an ivory tower where our ideas are only valuable to us. They have to be valuable to the army and the nation. And it's about leaders and ideas, not leaders or ideas. And that seemed to really help bring the faculty together. So culture can be changed, but you've got to get alignment between what you say, what you do, what you prioritize, what you measure and what you reward.
• 10:24
  Speaker C: Sir, I really enjoy that answer, especially as you just hit their alignment answering the second question. You also re answered the first one on alignment on big ideas, right through your example at the Army War College. I also really appreciate your idea being able to identify culture as an objective, objectively identify culture kind of in the sociological perspective or the psycho psychological perspective than just straight identifying description of it qualitative versus quantitative. And I appreciate you identifying the background of culture, like cultural backgrounds, where the schism might start and how to solve that.
• 10:56
  Speaker A: But you know, changing culture is not, it's not easy. It is not for the faint of heart. And if you come in and you, you think you can get a, you know, 20 degree azimuth change in an organization's culture in the first three months that you're in a unit that is actually very, very difficult to do. This is a super tanker. But I would say that a good leader should never just accept, oh, this is the culture. I'm never going to be able to do anything about it. I'll just live within the margins. I never accepted any organization's culture. I was not hired to be a caretaker of any, any organization that I was put in charge of. But I was smart enough to realize that culture doesn't change overnight. It's how can we get alignment on what we claim we're for, what we actually do, how we use resources, how we measure what we're doing, and how we reward or punish the people in us. And over time that can change culture.
• 11:51
  Speaker C: Sir, one of the jobs you held after leaving West Point as commandant was to command the US Army War College. As you just stated, the army invests an enormous amount into the professional development of the entire force, not only at places like West Point or the War College, but also at Sergeant Majors Academy, for example, and the overall NCO professional development system. In your experience, what professional development has worked the best for young leaders?
• 12:12
  Speaker A: So professional development, I think has three big components. One, is you would call the formal professional development. It's what you're doing here at West Point. It is the formal courses that you're taking, classes, all of that kind. It's a schooling. And the army will send you to your basic course, then to your captain's career course, then to Command General Staff College, then the war College. And all of those are formal professional development things. That is not nearly good enough. The next part is the jobs that you get, because every single job that you get in the army is an opportunity to develop yourself professionally, Whether that is a platoon leader. And then you leave platoon leader and they make you an assistant operations officer in a battalion. You're thinking, oh my gosh, now you're learning about how do you coordinate resources to make platoon leaders jobs easier. Then you know, you get. You get promoted all these different jobs, and you look at every single one of them as an opportunity to add more tools to my kit bag, to be a better leader. But I would say the one that absolutely cannot be neglected is self study. So what are you doing on your own? What are you reading every. Every night? So I started in every unit that I commanded a reading club. And it was a book a quarter. And sometimes that was crushing to my lieutenants. When I was a battalion commander and book a quarter, we would meet in the club and everyone had to participate and I had questions. When I was commandant, I ran a commandant's reading program. I thought it was the most fabulous thing I'd ever done. It was for first season cows and it was four books a year. And I'd bring the author in, but I'd only let the author talk for 10 minutes on his or her book. And then I had cadets on tables of 10 or so in icall and I had an officer or a senior NCO or both at the table with a list of kind of 10 discussion questions. Let's talk about this book and put it into our context. What's a young lieutenant want to know? I thought that was just fabulous. So I'm a big fan of self study. I always ask people what's on your nightstand? And my nightstand usually has five or six books because it really depends on what I'm kind of feeling like right now. I've got James Kerr book called Legacy, which is about the 15 rules of being a New Zealand all black rugby player. Fabulous book. I've got Artemis by Andy Weir because I really love the Martian, really loved Hail Mary project. And Artemis is the third book, or probably the second that he wrote. Not as good as. As the first two, but still. So if I. If I'm fried, I just need something to unwind. Yeah, I'm going to read, you know, something that stretches my mind. I love historical fiction to do that kind of thing. If I still have a pretty active mind, I need to. I need to do some more substance. I pull down to a leadership book or I pull down to a biography, so I've got a bunch going. I love books. My wife thinks I have way too many, but I. I love hard copy books because you got to be able to go back to it. You got to be able to write in the margins. Problem is, hard copy books weigh a lot, and when you get hundreds of them, it's an awful lot of books. So I would say formal. Yeah, you're going to get that regardless. Take advantage of all those formal opportunities, the jobs that you get. View every job assigned, even if it is one you're going, this is the worst thing ever. I got assigned to be the, you know, the range police guy. You know, okay, what am I learning about how to organize for efficiency and stuff like that. How do you. How do you use every job, every tasking? You get to be a better leader. And then self study. What are you reading? What are you thinking about? What are you writing? I'd urge cadets to lieutenants to captains to write articles. Engineer magazine is looking for lieutenant and captain articles. Whatever it happens to be, it's just a way of. Of developing yourself and giving back to the force.
• 16:02
  Speaker C: I'm extremely happy you mentioned self study, because that is my favorite form of study, personally. Finding what I identify as most important to me to learn and then learning it. I find I learned the most from that area.
• 16:14
  Speaker A: Well, as long as, you know, self study, at some point in time, you got to have something to bounce it off of, which is why I love the reading club, because you do kind of your self study and then there's a discussion, you go, you know, I didn't see it that way. You know, like, we had the discussion about Graham Allison's book Destined for War, and I told you that Professor Allison originally titled that with a question mark at the end. You know, he didn't want the declarative. China and the United States are destined for war. The publisher did. He had it much more. We're at a crossroads. How are we going to approach this? Are we destined for war? And so your ability to bounce ideas off people. So self study, followed by some kind of an interaction with people is a wonderful way of getting a more rounded View of these, these works?
• 17:03
  Speaker C: Yes, sir. Charm rap. In addition to being an avid reader of books, as you've just mentioned, you are also an author yourself. Your latest book is titled Accomplishing the Impossible. Leadership that launched Revolutionary Change. In your combat and organizational leadership experience, what was the moment you considered the situation nearly impossible but was accomplished anyway? And what leader behaviors or decisions, decision making allowed you or others to succeed?
• 17:27
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's funny that that book is a leadership study of Year of the American Revolution. So think Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill and, and all of that in the Boston area. And I had originally titled it the author's work entitled was in the Footsteps of Giants. It's a leadership study. And the publisher, when you're a know nothing author like me, the publisher gets to name your book. And he used the title of my fifth chapter, which was Accomplishing the Impossible. And he says that's what the name of this is going to be. And I, I was having so much fun as the Commandant of cadets that the army decided I was having too much fun doing that. And so I got promoted to two star and sent to Afghanistan as the commander of the National Support Element, deputy commanding general for support of US forces Afghanistan. So 17,000 people in this conglomerate of organizations, logistics, communications, medical, all of that. And the President had announced that we were getting out of Afghanistan on 31st December 2014. He had also announced that we're getting out of Iraq 31 December 2011, and this was September 2011. And the army didn't really think he was serious on both of those counts. No, he's going to change his mind, allow us to leave 10,000, 15,000, something like that. And come August time frame, the President said, I am serious. You're going to be out of Iraq 100% by 31 December. And so they were just moving things, just incredible speed getting things out of Iraq. But he said the same thing for December 31, 2014 in Afghanistan and Afghanistan had none of that capability. And I got there and I said, the President said, we have to be able to be at 0 by 31st December. How much stuff do we have? And they said, well, sir, I don't know, we got to go count it. And the count came back. 95,000 full shipping containers, full of stuff, 45,000 vehicles of which we were using about 8,000. All the rest of them were older vehicles that we brought them in. They still had residual value to the United States taxpayer, but they were just parked. We're very immobile. Because if you think you're on a small company battle position, you've got four sets of vehicles. You've got the newest MRAPs that you just got, then you've got the older ones, then you've got the UP armored jeeps, and they're all just kind of parked right there. And if you were to move, you'd have to find a way to move all of that stuff, otherwise you'd be abandoning equipment for bad guys, potentially. And so we became very immobile because of that. And I said, how many, how much stuff can we get out? And they said, well, right now, sir, we can get out 50 vehicles and 50, 50 shipping containers a month. I said, that's awesome. That means we'll meet the president's guidance in 2062. And I'm not thinking he's going to be okay with, with that timeline. So I had no idea how to get this stuff out, but I did the math in my head and I said, I just came up with a number. We have to be able to get out 1200 vehicles and 1500 shipping containers every single month starting as soon as we can, in order to even be impossible on a timeline. And they looked at me like I was absolutely nuts. I said, I have no idea how to do it, but 1200 vehicles, 1500 shipping containers have to, you know, be cleared from this theater by that time in May of 2012. So six months after I challenged the team to do that, they came up and they said, sir, we met the 1200 and 1500 goal. I said, that's fantastic. High fives all around. I said, but a question. How much stuff did we bring in? Ah, about 600 vehicles and about 700 containers this past month. And so I said, okay, licks on me. That needs to be net reduction of 1200 vehicles and 1500, you know, so anything you bring in counts against your stuff going out. I had to increase the number of boots on the ground. And the President said, a real firm no more boots on the ground. But the only way you could actually process that many vehicles is you had to have people who could do that, weren't. That weren't actively fighting the fight. That went all the way up to the White House. The White house authorized another 3,500 soldiers. They now call it the CENTCOM Material Recovery Element. I'd originally called it the Retrograde Task Force, but President Obama and his team thought that was too warlike, so they went with CENTCOM Material Recovery Element. I didn't really care what it was called. I got my 3,500 soldiers. And it was ideas from junior officers and senior NCOs that bubbled up that created these capabilities, like retro sort yards that would allow us to go through these shipping containers and figure out what it was. And it turns out we had everything we needed. It was just in containers and we didn't know where it was. And it became an intra theater distribution problem than a bring more stuff in from the states problem on many instances. And so I didn't have any idea how to do that. I just knew I had to challenge the team and let the good ideas come up. And they did. And so I think that very proud of that logistics team. They were amazing at making that happen.
• 22:17
  Speaker C: Yes, sir. I also appreciate the reevaluation, constant reevaluation to achieve something you think might be impossible at the moment. Realizing what you do have at your disposal or realizing what you're doing wrong, that hinders your previous progress.
• 22:29
  Speaker A: Right.
• 22:29
  Speaker C: I feel like that's a good lesson to learn and how you deal with challenges throughout your life. Sir. Sir. Over your long military career, you gained extensive experience serving as a leader at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war. What is one leadership lesson you learned over your experience in an out of uniform that you pass on to the next generation of military leaders?
• 22:47
  Speaker A: If there was one thing that I could tell cadets, junior leaders, I tell it all the way up to corporate C suites when I'm working with them on leadership. I said, you've got all of these wonderful values on your values chart and the things that you claim to espouse. But there's two values that underpin all of them. They are humility, which is, I do not know everything and I'm always able to learn. I'm always able to get better. There's always something that somebody can tell me. I'm not the smartest person in the room. I can change my mind when the, when the information changes. The second is courage. Having the moral courage to act upon that. The cadets will say, do the harder right instead of the easier wrong. But sometimes as an officer, our ego gets so involved in our plan that it's easier to stick with a bad plan, even though when people have pointed out that this is not so good and it's kind of easier because you feel like it's a sign of weakness if you change your mind. But I think humility and courage allow for there to be respect for others. Humility and courage allow for, you know, to really, truly believe in collaboration, because collaboration is hard, you know, frankly. But it's better on these really complex problems that don't have a clear right answer. I mean, there's always kind of three kinds of plans. The plan that will work, the plan that won't work, and the plan that might work. Well, the will work and the won't work are easy. You know, do the first one, don't do the second one. The might works. Really only might work if everybody's aligned on them, if everybody is kind of bought in, if you're not going down an irreversible path that you might be able to pull back from. And so that takes humility and the courage to say, you know, this, this path has not been fruitful. We need to change course. Otherwise we're just doing stupid stuff purposefully, which in our business gets people killed. And that's not good.
• 24:49
  Speaker C: Sir, what's one story from your time as common of cadets at West Point that still makes you smile or shake your head?
• 24:55
  Speaker A: There's, there's kind of two. I had such a wonderful time as commandant and then the, In January of 2010, we had a big snowstorm, but it was a snowstorm where there was probably 8 inches of snow, but it was not a super cold snowstorm. So there's like perfect packing snow. And the cadets got into a huge snowball fight on Trophy Point and I went out there and joined them and we played basically capture the flag with snowballs. If you got hit, you had to go all the way back kind of thing. I got a pretty good arm. I was, I was given more than I was taken. And, and I remember some guy nailed me from a good distance and I wouldn't pay attention. I was making snowball whack and I hear this. I got the calm. I got the calm echoing across. It was so much fun. And then later on in that year, we had Thanksgiving and you know, my wife and I, with our three kids, you know, we always cook a big dinner and I asked the BTO brigade tactical officer if there were any cadets that weren't allowed to go home because of, you know, disciplinary problems or something like that, you know, send a few over my way. And so we got three or four cadets come over to join us for Thanksgiving dinner. And they're, they're all looking good in their dress gray uniforms, a little uncomfortable being in the comms house. And my 11 year old son, you know, right at the very beginning. So you guys are the convicts, huh? What did you do? I was like, robbie, really appreciate that, son. Robbie's now an artillery officer. Class of 21 graduated, but yeah. So you guys are the convicts, huh? Like goodness gracious. Love it. You had another question that, that we had talked about beforehand of songs that might bring me to places. It is kind of strange, but Desert Storm, the song that if I hear you just put you right there was by Bette Midler. It was called From a Distance. And then Iraqi Freedom, when I had my brigade over there and we're doing the counter IED fight, there was kind of two Toby Keith, you know, just about anything Toby Keith was doing, but American Soldier comes to mind. But then there was one by John Michael Montgomery called Letters from Home. Almost. If I watch that with the video, it literally you start crying. It is about getting mail from loved ones when you're in these situations. Those songs came out when I was over there. When I hear them, that puts me right back in those spots.
• 27:10
  Speaker C: Sir, if you could have dinner with any military leader from history, who would it be and why?
• 27:15
  Speaker A: Oh my goodness. Everybody says, ah, Napoleon, except he would be a pain in the butt. I'd love Winston Churchill, but I think he eats dinner way too late and there's way too much champagne in his dinners to have a viable conversation. I would love to, to have dinner with John Buford, Calvary Leader on 30 June 1863. He's the one that kind of chose to fight at Gettysburg. He's the one that used his Calvary and basically 1 to 6 odds, 1 to 8 odds to gain enough time for, for Reynolds to come up to, to make a decision on whether we're going to, to fight here or not. This is good ground. Buford went on to a, you know, continued, just one of these people could look into the future. I would love to have had a dinner with Bill Slim. He wrote one of my favorite books called Defeat into Victory. He's the, the four star general British who got beat by the Japanese in 41 all the way back into India, rebuilt an army from scratch. Is that the. I mean, if you're talking about where's the priority order of resourcing? The India army was probably the very lowest of everything. And yet he built it from scratch, taught his men how to fight in the jungle, gain their confidence back and beat the Japanese in their own game. Fighting in the wilderness. Just his book and Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs are two favorite memoirs. The kind of leaders would be ones where I would just. You'd want to sit there and talk with them and say, what did you think about? How did you do this? When everybody else is thinking there's just no way on these things. And yet you find. You find a way and you end up doing the right thing. Those would be fabulous. There's many more. I love books, so there's a whole bunch I'd love to have dinner with.
• 28:57
  Speaker C: Sir, do you have a favorite author you would like to have dinner with?
• 28:59
  Speaker A: Well, Forester, C.S. forster. He wrote the whole Master and Commander series, the Horatio Hornblower series. Master and Commander that came out of Patrick o', Brien, but the Horatio Hornblower series, fabulous. He wrote a great book called the Ship. I think it was published in 1943 in the Middle of the war. But it is about one 24 hour period on a light cruiser, British light cruiser in the Mediterranean trying to keep a convoy alive against incessant attacks. It is a leadership study on the microcosm of a. Of a ship. He would be fantastic just to. Just to talk with.
• 29:37
  Speaker C: Yes, sir. Well, General Rapp, thank you for your time today and for this great conversation about decision making and leadership yesterday, today, and tomorrow. On behalf of Colonel Pat Sullivan, the director of Modern War Institute, and Dr. Charlie Feint, the director of this podcast series, it is my pleasure to present you with this MWI coin. Thank you, sir.
• 29:54
  Speaker A: Thank you very much. Donovan. I. I really appreciated the the conversation.
• 29:57
  Speaker C: Thanks for having me too, sir. Thank you very much, sir.
• 30:03
  Speaker B: This has been an episode of Five Questions for a General, a production of the Modern War Institute of West Point. If you like what you heard today, please download, like, subscribe and share this podcast to help us reach an even larger audience. All statements in this podcast represent the personal views of the speakers and do not represent an official position of the United States Military Academy or the United States government.